Category: Uncategorized
Saturday assorted links
1. Should New York City or NY state pay for CUNY?
2. The American middle class is doing fine in Utah.
3. Will German privacy law conflict with the storage of economic data for research?
4. Some of the academics who support Donald Trump and what they say.
5. “The DeafSpace philosophy rests on five basic principles.” For instance:
Groups of signers will naturally form circles or arcs to include everyone. They avoid long, rectangular tables, which impede views. The least Deaf-supportive space Bauman could think of, when I asked him what it might be, was the traditional classroom with straight rows of desks; that layout breaks up lines of communication, except between student and teacher. Many classrooms at Gallaudet have round or horseshoe-shaped seating arrangements. Meeting rooms may have oval desks; lecture halls are raked, and ideally have multiple aisles so an audience member can easily take the stage when he or she wants to ask a question.
An excellent article, interesting throughout.
Illiquidity does not seem to lower the quality of decision-making
There is a new AER piece by Leandro S. Carvalho, Stephan Meier, and Stephanie W. Wang, here is the abstract:
We study the effect of financial resources on decision-making. Low-income US households are randomly assigned to receive an online survey before or after payday. The survey collects measures of cognitive function and administers risk and intertemporal choice tasks. The study design generates variation in cash, checking and savings balances, and expenditures. Before-payday participants behave as if they are more present-biased when making intertemporal choices about monetary rewards but not when making intertemporal choices about nonmonetary real-effort tasks. Nor do we find before-after differences in risk-taking, the quality of decision-making, the performance in cognitive function tasks, or in heuristic judgments.
I would describe that one as a victory for Gary Becker…
Here are ungated versions.
Friday assorted links
1. Algorithms to predict police misconduct.
2. When should you post or not post about your children on-line?
3. Is Cambodia’s Hun Sen buying most of his Facebook likes?
5. Star Wars: The Force Awakens received £31.6 million in British government tax subsidies, which means it was “certified as culturally British.”
6. The Thai movie Cemetery of Splendor is likely to end up as the best of the year, review here.
7. Jeffrey Goldberg (and Obama) on Obama’s foreign policy, yes it is a must read, it will end up as one of the best pieces of the year. See also the commentary by David Brooks.
Why Merkel’s deal with Turkey won’t work
First, the envisioned mass group deportation of irregular migrants from Greece back to Turkey is probably illegal under Europe’s commitments to the Geneva Conventions, which calls for individual evaluation of asylum cases and not mass deportations. Judicial review of this deal may well strike it down.
Second, the 1-1 swap model with Turkey is a nonscalable fantasy. EU leaders acknowledge that it does “not establish any new commitments on Member States as far as relocation and resettlement is concerned.” In other words, European leaders assume that any refugees accepted directly from Turkey will come out of the already agreed 160,000 quota slated for relocation from inside the European Union. While EU leaders should be applauded for trying to replace illegal migration through Turkey with a new regularized and legal route for refugees to enter Europe, it defies belief that EU member states will be more willing to accept refugees directly from Turkey than they have been willing to accept relocations from fellow EU members Greece and Italy. To date only a ludicrously low 885 refugees have been relocated, a fact certain to dampen Ankara’s willingness to accept returned irregular migrants from Greece. Rather than a 1-1 swap arrangement, this deal actually appears only to be a 0.00001–0.00001 arrangement.
That is from Jacob Funk Kirkegaard, the piece has other good points too.
What women want and what men get
Family structure in the United States has shifted substantially over the last three decades, yet the causes and implications of these changes for the well-being of family members remains unclear. This paper exploits task-based shifts in demand as an exogenous shock to sex-speci fic wages to demonstrate the role of the relative female to male wage in the family and labor market outcomes of women. I show that increases in the relative wage lead to a decline in the likelihood of marriage for those on the margin of a fi rst marriage, and present suggestive evidence that these eff ects are concentrated among less-desirable matches. A higher relative wage also causes women to increase their hours of work, reduce their dependence on a male earner, and increase the likelihood of taking guardianship over their children. These findings indicate that improvements in the relative wage have facilitated women’s independence by reducing the monetary incentive for marriage, and can account for 20% of the decline in marriage between 1980 and 2010.
That is the job market paper (pdf) of Na’ama Shenhav from UC Davis.
For the pointer I thank Ben Southwood.
Thursday assorted links
1. Robots in American law. And more on AlphaGo.
2. The people who can’t stop making puns.
3. Have gender stereotypes changed over the last thirty years?
4. Juniorization, especially on Wall Street.
5. Is passive investing hurting the economy?
Why is it so hard to find the cash register?
That is increasingly the case at some upper end stores and boutiques. Ray A. Smith has a very good WSJ piece on this phenomenon, here is one bit:
More high-end boutiques and department stores are moving the machine out of sight or eliminating it entirely.
Instead, sales associates walk the floors with mobile checkout devices or handle transactions in discreet nooks. Stores aim to make the experience of paying more elegant, akin to private shopping, and to eliminate a pain point that keeps some shoppers from completing a purchase—having to wait in a visible line. Hiding the cash register also forces shoppers to interact with the salespeople and might even encourage them to buy more.
Furthermore:
1. Waiting in line is described as “unenlightened.”
2. I enjoyed this remark: “We’re downplaying that last transactional part of the experience…” And this: “”Researchers have identified a concept known as “the pain of paying,” said Ziv Carmon, a professor of marketing at Insead, a business school with campuses in Europe, Asia and the Middle East. “Doing away with the queue and even with the register makes the upcoming pain of paying less salient,” he said.”
3. When customers are not waiting in line but rather having their purchases processed “privately,” salespeople are encouraged to socialize with them and get to know them better. And: “Stores say sales associates are expected to sense when a shopper is ready to pay.”
Recommended.
Wednesday assorted links
1. In memoriam: R. Morris Coats, a second wave public choice scholar in camouflage (RIP).
2. Claims about money and happiness.
3. What if you were First Lady of Peru all of a sudden? Would it be fun?
4. Asteroid impact mission? And more.
5. Why are women more likely to escape North Korea?
6. Google software beats the GO master in game one (NYT). Ungated here.
Econ Duel! Is Education Signaling or Skill Building?
Marginal Revolution University has a brand new feature, Econ Duel! Our first Econ Duel features Tyler and me debating the question, Is education more about signaling or skill building?
The new Brookings paper on the productivity slowdown
This piece (pdf) is by David M. Byrne, John G. Fernald, and Marshall B.Reinsdorf. It argues that the productivity slowdown is real, and not the result of mismeasuring the value of information technology. Here were some of the newer bits for me:
Adjustments to equipment, software, and intangibles imply faster GDP growth but also faster input growth (since effective capital services are rising more quickly). After adjusting hardware and software, the aggregate TFP slowdown after 2004 is modestly worse. Adding additional intangibles, as in Corradoet al. (2009), works modestly in the other direction, so in our broadest adjustment for investment goods leaves the 1-1/4 percentage point TFP slowdown little changed.
And later they restate the point in more general terms:
…we highlight here the conceptual reason why it is hard for capital mismeasurement to explain the past slowdown in TFP growth: It affect inputs as well as output in largely offsetting ways.
Note that there are some unmeasured productivity gains from fracking:
…fracking allow[s] access to lower “quality” natural resources is imperfectly measured. A back-of-the-envelope calculation suggests that true aggregate labor and TFP growth might be 5 basis points faster since 2004.
Outsourcing however cuts the other way:
…the import-prices declines from offshoring are largely missed. This led to an understatement of true import growth in the late 1990s and early 2000s (the time of China’s WTO accession), and a corresponding overstatement of perhaps 10 bp in growth in output, labor productivity, and TFP.
That makes three very good papers in the last few weeks, by very reputable economists, coming from different directions, but all establishing more or less the same conclusion. My discussions of the other two papers are here and here.
So will this myth finally die?
Sweden fact of the day
In 2013, six million students across OECD countries graduated from a higher education institution with a bachelor’s degree; 58% of them were women. This percentage ranges from 69% in Sweden [emphasis added] to 45% in Japan. Besides Japan, only Germany, Korea, Switzerland and Turkey still have more male than female graduates.
That is from the OECD, via NinjaEconomics.
Tuesday assorted links
1. Progress in human geography (not from The Onion).
2. “It’s the first time that the burger group will also come out to vote,” quipped politician Sheikh Rasheed Ahmed before the elections in May 2013. “They’re going to join the chapati-and-salan [curry] folk. They might need to carry their laptops on their heads to protect them from the sun.”
The first, underlined link is from the article itself, the source link is here, sprawling but interesting throughout on Pakistan.
3. Livestream sources for the AI Go match against the human champion.
4. The culture that is Britain: “J.K. Rowling tweeted after her visit: “@OrkneyLibrary I had the best time! Thanks for wonderful chat, cake and, of course, letting me touch The Book.”
A photo attached to the tweet shows the author holding a book about organic gardening by Coronation Street actress Thelma Barlow.”
Assorted Monday links
1. Code of conduct for economic modellers? (Australia, and note there is audio at the link).
2. Smart watches that enable exam cheating.
Sunday assorted links
1. Where did the genius of the Polgar sisters come from?
2. Oxford University philosopher Nick Bostrom says the discovery of fossilized complex life on another world “would be by far the worst news ever printed on a newspaper cover.” On Robin Hanson’s “great filter” theory.
3. “Journalist who reported Minnesota county was ‘worst place to live’ is moving there.” And ostensibly ordinary Pyongyang.
4. Sweden is growing at 4.5% a year.
5. Professional bridge has a cheating problem.
6. Which college majors benefit most from law school? The paper is here.